about half an hour later, move the mouse, and fittttt, same thing, now its weird!

kill it again, and power on, this time checking power lead before doing so, all Ok there.this time it only gets as far as windows logon, and am about to contemplate clicking desktop Icon to open outlook, and Fitttttt, same thing.

Now it's really Odd!

So I head off to work, puzzling over it, my wife fires it up later in the morning, and it does same for her? so i came home at lunch time and picked up the box, and took it back to work, plugged it in to test slot at work, and it worked fine for the rest of the day???

Now we are at the annoying stage.

Whats getting to be a long story, shortened, I took it home again, and started from scratch, plugged in bare bones mouse, keyboard (ps2) and monitor, and run again to check it's not a peripheral causing the issue.

Got right through the evening progressively pluging in everything again in stages, and it's running fine, use it for the evening, leave it running over night, come out in the morning, wiggle the mouse to take of screen saver, Fittttttt, same again!

Take it back to work, this time with home keyboard, mouse and monitor, to see if it will do it at work.

It did die same way virtually straight away, so I swapped each component with another, keyboard, mouse in USB, and different monitor, but it still did it after every component change.

Then booted in safe mode,it had a strange split screen that was hard to navigate, so closed it down via windows, and restarted normally, ran fine for the afternoon, did virus scan with AVG8, no issues found, left it running a movie for the afternoon while out of office, when I got back, in hibernate type mode again.

I gave up at this point, and left it there.

Have my work lappie at home tonight, so don't need POS PC!

Any ideas?, I was thinking Power supply, but the PC'S a 7 year old Compaq Presario, so don't want to spend to much on it if I'm going to have to replace it anyway! but dont want to replace whole if it's just a PSU, catch 22 I know!

Yeah from what you said, it's likely the power supply is the culprit although it could be a few other things as wellAre all fans inside the case operating & not filled up with dust? esp. the CPU fan

I had a friend bring me his computer today which showed nearly the same symptoms as what you are having and look at the crap in the heatsink after I took off the CPU fan. You would't believe how hot it was running! Kept turning itself off and I'm not surprised.

My story was starting to border on novel, so I had to leave out a few details, didn't want to bore people to sleep with a great long winded run down.

Yip, I checked all the fans were OK, and there was a bit of build up on the heatsink, but nowhere near as clogged as your fine example, did my dusting, and checked all PSU connections at the same time, actually made it do it while watching input power light on the PSU case, no flicker/outage etc there, but still suspect it!only reason I have ruled out CPU overheat is it doesn't seem to matter if the comp has been running all night, or if it's been off all night, it has still done this basically as soon as you turn it on.Then when it does keep running, you can open up some normal CPU suckers movies etc, and it wont do it.So maybe I need to bit the bullet and just flick a new PSU in it, usual story, have other things I would rather spend the reddies on, and you sorta get attached to the old PC'S as well, so dont want to replace the whole thing if I dont have to.Cheers for the reply OmniouS

billyvan: My story was starting to border on novel, so I had to leave out a few details, didn't want to bore people to sleep with a great long winded run down.

Yip, I checked all the fans were OK, and there was a bit of build up on the heatsink, but nowhere near as clogged as your fine example, did my dusting, and checked all PSU connections at the same time, actually made it do it while watching input power light on the PSU case, no flicker/outage etc there, but still suspect it!only reason I have ruled out CPU overheat is it doesn't seem to matter if the comp has been running all night, or if it's been off all night, it has still done this basically as soon as you turn it on.Then when it does keep running, you can open up some normal CPU suckers movies etc, and it wont do it.So maybe I need to bit the bullet and just flick a new PSU in it, usual story, have other things I would rather spend the reddies on, and you sorta get attached to the old PC'S as well, so dont want to replace the whole thing if I dont have to.

Cheers for the reply OmniouS

My suggestion would be to buy a new PSU that you can put into a new computer if necessary.. That way if the PSU doesnt fix the problem and a new computer is needed you can buy and make up your new PC adding in the PSU you just bought ;)

Well PSU has been replaced, and it's still doing it!I just cant pick whats causing it, seems really weird that it should go into a sort of standby mode, can still hear the disc running, but all the cooling fans have stopped(except the PSU).It's definitely like some sort of protection override, but for what?It seems to be getting worse, as it wont get any further than initial start up screens before going on holiday.I may try a roll back in safe mode tomorrow to try to rule out anything setting wise, but other than that, I'm open to ideas still!

I've just noticed there are a couple more questions in the Desktop Computing category, that have sprung up over the last couple of days, that show similar symptoms.I am starting to think it may be a conspiracy ;), is it time to break out the tin foil hats?

Well I'm still clinging to the hope that I will be able to fix the old PC.I had noticed this little issue before, but thought it wouldn't be that??There are some components of the motherboard that seem to be suffering from bubbling.As per this photo there are about four of the tall blue items, that have the look of an old corroding battery.

The row of six just under the heat sink holder bracket are the worst ones.Can someone suggest if there is a test method to confirm the condition of the motherboard, or if this could be attributed to my particular fault.

I guess now I have to look into a new motherboard.I have access at work to a component wholesaler, so I will need to do my homework on whats best to put in it.They have a good selection of Gigabyte boards, so now I just need to know the answers to any questions they will probably ask, to work out which is the best one to get.May even be a good time to update the CPU?????

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